Following Atticus: Forty-Eight High Peaks, One Little Dog, and an Extraordinary Friendship by Tom Ryan is published by William Morrow. It tells the story of my adventures with Atticus M. Finch, a little dog of some distinction. You can also find our column in the NorthCountry News.

There is a song of November and I think it is as lovely as the trees are barren.Updike sums it up well.Sure there are gray days ahead, more darkness
and freezing temperatures are on the way, but the forests are so beautiful this
time of year.The streams murmur and run
clear and cold.The night sky black but
adorned by stars so brilliant it takes your breath away.And the quiet is peaceful and calming,
especially on a mountainside now that the crowds have gone.

High up there are varying levels of snow but below three thousand feet the
mountains are simple bare and plain.A
simplicity exists away from the heat and humidity and the bugs and the people,
and a certain bare-bones familiarity that exists before winter hits us full on
and covers everything in white for the next four or five months.I’ve fallen quite in love with November for
these very reasons.And now that it’s
easier to breathe, so has Atticus.He no
longer slinks about like an old dog who is closer to thirteen than twelve.He’s back to bouncing along the trails knee
deep in a plush carpet of crinkling brown leaves on the forest floor.He’s young again, happy to be out again, and
having to wait up for me once again.How
can I not love this time of year for that reason alone?

On Thanksgiving Day Atticus and I will head off and find a mountain where there
are no cars at the trailhead.I’ll make
a list of a few and if the weather is dry and the views clear, we’ll climb a
mountain by ourselves and eat our dinner on a ledge with views to the sacred
lands before us.How fortunate we are to
live in a place where this is possible and to live without the constraints of
having to be somewhere else to please someone else.This was part of our reason for leaving
behind a more civilized life which also felt like a more stultified one.

We all have our reasons for seeking out the mountains.For me it’s as much about spirituality and
peace as it is about the beauty and exercise a hike contains.I find myself in these mountains again and
again.I find reasons for gratitude on
the flat and steep trails while breathing easily or with so much difficulty I
have to surrender to my own exhaustion and racing heart.As a matter of fact, that’s where the moment
of grace often hits me – when I have to stop because my breath cannot keep up
with my desires and I’m hanging my head and wiping sweat from my brow.There over the noise of my inhaling and
exhaling sits the quiet of the natural world.

This time of year there isn’t even much birdsong and the leaves are gone and
the trees stand before me as naked as can be.There’s nothing to hide, no one to impress, and they are nothing but who
they are.It’s ironic to me that when I
often find the forest most alive is when all is gray – sometimes even the
November sky.

I read yesterday with a heavy heart that Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk
who is perhaps the most spiritual soul I know of on this earth, is close to
death.At eighty-eight he’s had a brain hemorrhage.There is no way of knowing how much time he
has left before his body gives up and he becomes spirit and memory.I often think of him and his spiritual soul
mate, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, writer, and mystic when I’m in the
woods this time of year.The two men
only met once but they stayed in touch until Merton died a few years later in
the late sixties.

Both of these monks from different religions and opposite ends of the world
found tranquility and grace in nature. Much like many of us do.They understood our place in the grand scheme
of things and whenever life became too crazy they retreated to the simplicity
of nature.

Following Atticus on the mountain trails helped me to ditch my ego, my
accomplishments, even the stopwatch I used to wear on every hike.Following my friend I fell more in line with
what matters most and let nature set the pace.This is something both Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh came to understand.It’s what I am always learning on the sides
of mountains and why we seek out the peaks where no one else is.

It’s during those moments when my body cannot keep pace I’m made to stop and
just take a moment to wait and be silent.Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote: “Breathing in, there is only the present
moment.
Breathing out, it is a wonderful moment.”And that’s what I’m learning.There is the trailhead, there is the summit, and then there is
everything in betwee

As Thanksgiving Day arrives I hope that each of our readers finds far more to
be thankful for than to be weighed down by.May you have a day of simplicity and joy with those you love, doing what
fulfills you.

Monday, November 03, 2014

It's
Monday morning and the forest has a different look and feel to it after the
strong winds we've had.Gusts still ride
high over the tree tops sounding like a runaway ghost train but the sun has
returned and red squirrels and chipmunks are active and their chatter is
comical.Pine cones are everywhere,
knocked from their perches to the earth where death will become life.They crunch underfoot and the pine tar gets
on everything.Once a week I massage and
clean Atticus's pads with olive oil to get rid of debris and to recondition
them.This time of year I do it twice a
week.

Ten
days have passed since Will left us and I'm avoiding our Facebook page to some
extent. This is when it helps to have great moderators.The kindness and love is evident by the vast
majority of people who post, and also appreciated, but this being social media,
projection also is present.We all
experience death but it's a personal experience.I've never been a big fan of people saying
"been there done that" about anything, and because I think of death
as a miracle of its own - which may differ from what others believe - I tend to avoid the
typical calling cards of cliché when it comes to something equaling a sacrament
to me.Life and death are worthy of so
much more than clichés.

My
goal in loss is to learn and grow from it, to take joy from those who we
traveled with who are no longer with us, to make their presence in our life
into a gift I can always carry with me.

Several
times last week people wanted to believe that Atticus was mourning.He wasn't.He still isn't.He's buoyant and
free.I'm not mourning either, not
really.As I told Christine Heinz on
Twitter this morning, we did what we set out to do in taking in Will.

I
thought his visit with us was going to be much shorter than it turned out to
be.That was a plus to me.When Will reclaimed himself it was a joy to
behold.His eyes were young and
expectant.When I'd walk up to him and he
looked at me and I couldn't help but smile.

In
the very end Will was far less than what he'd come to be with us.He couldn't sit like a lion for more than a
few seconds.He'd topple over without
being propped up.He was rotting from
the inside out (I'll leave the details too various myself).You saw him mostly as fresh and clean and
sweet and so alive over the last few months, but that's because of the
photographs I shared of him. He was
still sweet, but he was also dying.

I've
not been crying very much.I have
thoughtful moments and much to digest.I
will cry for Will down the road when I talk about him at events, I'm sure, but
not out of sadness.It will be because
of the gift of the experience.It's what
the mythologist Joseph Campbell aptly named, "the experience of being
alive."

Will
came to us at fifteen.My job was to be
by his side and give him what he needed when he needed it.That was everything from patience; to food
and water; to bathing him when he fell in his urine and feces and couldn't get
up; to stretching exercises and massage; to experiences with nature; to flowers
and music and sweet and savory smells; to reassuring touches; to love and
acceptance and shared growth; and finally to let him leave this physical world
when his body no longer worked and I didn't want to compromise him for my own
sake.

The
decision to say goodbye is so very hard, but in Will's case it was easier
because it was clear to me.I considered
the entire journey to be textured and genuine and fortunate for Will and
me.Sitting in a beautiful mountainside
field with him in my arms while he snored, then standing to hold him while
Rachael let his sleep become permanent was and will always be a sacred
experience.I can think of no higher
honor than to recognize a friend for who he or she is and what his or her needs
are and help them to where they need to go.

Will
needed to be loved and believed in. He needed someone in his corner over the
last chapter of his life.He had
that.I can't speak for him but I
imagine he has no regrets and he felt nothing but love.

Over
the past week I've heard from friends who knew Will two and a half years ago
from when he first came to be with us and they couldn't believe the impressive
change in him.There weren't many he
didn't try to bite those first few months - even the ever-so-gentle
Tracy at Ultimutt Cut Salon, who understood his hatred of being put in a crate and
never forced that on him - had to be careful of his teeth in the beginning.

When
Will first arrived here he smelled of death.Much of that had to do with his mouth and his rotten teeth.Our vet at the time, Christine O'Connell,
went to work on that but could only get a fraction done while he was under
anesthesia.There were several places where
the gums had receded so far tips of the roots were barely
concealed and you could push a small object through the opening between them. His mouth hadn’t been taken care of for years – if ever.

Exercise
specialists we went to clearly saw what I did, that Will had not had much, if
any, exercise for a long time before he came to us.They concluded his unnaturally stiff hips were
a product of being crated for far too long for far too many years.

His
mouth would never improve, but his willingness to accept love and offer it
did.His joints improved too, until
the last weeks when they appeared as though they had been tightened to the
point of pain by a wrench.

One
of the joys in sharing our journey with hundreds of thousands of people is that
Will, once unwanted and neglected, was celebrated.He became a model for adopting animals who seem
like lost causes.He was proof you can't
judge a book by its cover.I was
thrilled that for the past year and a half he's received flowers and blankets
because of many of you investing in him.

Will was so miserable and broken when he arrived that over the first two weeks I was close to putting him out of his misery.I pitied him.In the last week of his life, I knew what had to be done but pity was
the furthest thing from my mind.I’d say
what I was feeling had more to do with celebration.

I can’t speak to what befell Will before he came to us, only to what the
evidence revealed.But even then it wasn’t
to judge those he lived with before because that didn’t matter to me.What mattered was what we were going to do
with the shattered puzzle of Will.Together, he and I worked to put him back together again, with an occasional assist
from Atticus.But as I always say, in the end Will
rescued himself.We gave him a helping
hand but in the end the final choices were always his to make.

I’m glad we’ve shared Will's life with you, and his passing, but I also know
enough to stay away from too much that is written about him by people who never
met him, or interacted with him for a very short while.It’s sickening to have
someone you love be dissected by those who knew very little and who cared
nothing of him over the past two and a half years.Thankfully it’s also rare, but when it
happens it’s noticed, occasionally by me, more often by others.This is the price of making public your life
with someone.I understand this.But it’s also one of the reasons I’m careful
about wading into uncomfortable waters and why I’ve never visited other
websites about dogs.Too many armchair
quarterbacks.As of late some of them
have appeared on our own Facebook page (and others), but our moderators quickly
move to change that.

On the positive side, there has been an incredible amount of response in celebrating Will’s
life.I know many feel sad about
his dying but I cannot do anything about that.I can only say that I’m not feeling the same way and I have a hard time imaging Will was
ever very sad over the past two years of his life.It was a grand final chapter and I’m happy for him and proud of him.

Life and death are very personal, but if we can share these personal
experiences and people are reverent enough to simply witness what they see and
not judge it, some good can come of it. I
feel confident much good has already come from Will and his journey and that many can only continue. Knowing that others will do get chances at new life because of Will is something to celebrate.

Thank you,Tom

(To help other animals in need we've set up a memorial fund in Will's name at the Conway Area Humane Society. Some have asked why I chose C.A.H.S. There are many reasons, but they start at the top of that organization. I believe anytime an unwanted animal finds a new home there are limitless possibilities for happy endings. That said, I've learned quite a bit about rescue - the good and the bad. It's hard work. I support C.A.H.S. because of Virginia Moore, the executive director. In a field where some put themselves above the animals they are supposed to be helping, Virginia has the perfect perspective. She restored my belief in those who get rescue right.)